Tuesdays with Dorie: Golden Brioche Loaves

When I first saw that we’d be making Golden Brioche Loaves this week, I thought, “Haven’t we made this one already?” Well, yes and no. We’ve made brioche on a few occasions, but always for anendresult other than a simple loaf. Jules pointed out that last week, King Arthur wrote a post on brioche made in a 9″x4″ pullman pan. Go figure, I have that same pan at home! Doing a little back-of-the-envelope math, I geusstimated that 2/3 of Dorie’s full recipe would make enough dough to fill one 9″x4″ pullman to the lid. I had to add about 10-15 minutes to Dorie’s baking time, but I had a gorgeous (and golden) square-cornered loaf.

I bet some people find brioche to be intimidating, but to me it’s one of the easier yeast breads to make. The dough is soft and supple, and comes together easily by machine. Also, great brioche bakes up nicely in a home oven, unlike, say, a great baguette, whose perfectly shattering crust seems to elude me at home. And the dough freezes well, so you can have fresh brioche buns in a snap.

This recipe really does produce a delightful loaf. I can’t lie, though…the fact that I made a single loaf of bread that contains two entire sticks of butter is somewhat horrifying to me! Nevertheless, I enjoyed a fat slice with homemade apricot jam (made identically to this plum jam), and, you guessed it, more butter (I have a weakness for fancy French salted butters on my toast and bread).

Lovely brioche and lovely photo! I missed all the other brioche recipes for TWD, so I was excited to make it. I resisted topping it with butter, but if I had fancy French butter, I would have spread some on!

I chickened out this week. I made the dough for the snails and the sticky buns when we made them before, but something just told me I didn’t need to be going there this week with Matt off at college and me home alone with it while Mark was at work. Seeing yours, I made the right decision…oh my that looks delicious!